The Tenchi franchise is massive and there are a ton of things we don't have available in English, hence why we have this translation section. One that's been bugging me a lot is the Hasegawa novels. There are 13 of them in total and only one has been put into any form which we on this side of the pond could understand - Midsummer's Eve as the movie "Daughter of Darkness". That still leaves 12 of them untouched, and hell I want to see what the novel may have had that the movie didn't.

I wish to push for a translation effort to finally make the contents of these novels available. A 100% translation effort. There's so much story there that we just don't know! And seeing how Midsummer's Eve tackled some very interesting issues that Tenchi hadn't before, it makes me want to see what else Hasegawa had in store for our favorite group of space misfits. I want to do whatever it takes to get these stories translated.

At the moment details are scarce to find online about any of them. We have scans available here in the Novels section and title translations but not much else. The only other bit I could find was on ANB's blog, which was only a translation done of Hasegawa's introduction of herself and her involvement in OVA1's production. Some cool info found in there but nothing relevant to the contents of the novel itself.

If you would like to join the crew and help us get these translated, by all means post and let us know! We can always use an extra pair of eyes, another brain to unscramble the Japanese text to English. Native Japanese understanding would be an excellent talent but if you're unable to and still want to help we can get you set up with the same tools we at Heaven & Earth Translations use for our Doujin translation. If you can't but know someone who can, don't be afraid to point them here!

You can follow progress through this topic or through our Twitter account, the latter of which will be seeing more constant updates and goofy translation errors.

We'll use this topic as a general basis for operations. Folks who want to lend a hand can post here, members of the team can talk progress here, it'll serve as an all-encompassing discussion until we have a completed work worthy of its own thread. Perhaps once we've completed this, we can wrap back around and give the Shin Tenchi novels a full translation instead of the summary we currently have. It is late here so I may go back and add/change some things to this post later on but for now here be the OP.

Current team assigned to novel work:

Nil AdmirariWisperGshadowsfall0CrazedJGZinv

Possibly to join:

Julia(Machine/hand translator) - Busy with School, may be able to lend a hand in the future.

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- Sat Feb 01, 2014 11:06 am#22045
I may have classes and such but I want to contribute to this. Hasegawa's novels are something I've been wanting to see translated for a while now, and I want to put forward the effort and help to get this done. I need the software but as you said, I can get it from Crazed or JG. The reader that you have that works with vertical text is a key asset for these novel's too.

Basically, get me equipped and count me in. ^-^

"As the opening of springmakes this old man's heart singI feel the beauty of the hoursas the camellia blooming flowersfloat by on gossamer wings"

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- Sun Feb 02, 2014 2:43 pm#22058
I might be able to help. My school/schoolwork takes first priority for me, also since I have such weak Japanese skills (I know the kanas, only a small handful of kanji, random phrases and words, so I heavily rely on my books and various websites to look stuff up), I don't know how much help I would be. I did manage to get the translation for -If-(but that was also just a sentence lol), so if you guys will provide me with the materials I can basically do the same thing, work at my own pace and do everything with my books and then maybe compare when we all get our stuff done. You guys get things done more quickly with the machines, I might just be in the way... I've also never done translations of big bodies of text (I sometimes translate comic pages for myself for practice) so this would also be new for me ^^;

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julia wrote:I might be able to help. My school/schoolwork takes first priority for me, also since I have such weak Japanese skills (I know the kanas, only a small handful of kanji, random phrases and words, so I heavily rely on my books and various websites to look stuff up), I don't know how much help I would be. I did manage to get the translation for -If-(but that was also just a sentence lol), so if you guys will provide me with the materials I can basically do the same thing, work at my own pace and do everything with my books and then maybe compare when we all get our stuff done. You guys get things done more quickly with the machines, I might just be in the way... I've also never done translations of big bodies of text (I sometimes translate comic pages for myself for practice) so this would also be new for me ^^;

Schoolwork comes first, always!

Speed will ramp up the further we go along and the more members we amass so it may become a bit overwhelming for you depending on how much momentum we can build. Though as I said earlier I'd be more than willing to dump off the Machine Translations of the pages I did and you could refine whatever I came up with based on the actual pages for practice!

On that note, I want to start getting the word out beyond the borders of the forum itself. For this reason I've created a Twitter account that I will be posting progress to from time to time. This week I'd like to start a retweet campaign through the fandom to draw as many eyes to the project as humanly possible. We'll need as much Tenchiforum twitter love as we can get. Perhaps the Tenchiforum tumblr/facebook can do a shoutout to the twitter account and forum thread once we start the campaign?

Organization. Something we'll need to work on is collaborating, claiming who will take what blocks and what steps must be taken before a page is considered "done". The simplest solution I've come up with so far is a private google docs spreadsheet made for each book. Page blocks will be divided and clearly labeled as claimed by a specific member, who will then update each page's cell with a status. Something along the lines of "Incomplete" for a fully untranslated page, "Machine" for a fully machine-translated page and "Localized" for when the contents of that page have been converted into smooth, fluent English. Not set in stone though, things will possibly change over the next week or two.

Friend of mine suggested we try fishing for some folks from Baka-Tsuki, think it'd be worth going over there for?

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Firstly, we've hit a milestone in work already! The first block of 20 files has been completely machine translated and currently awaits clarity editing work. Book one's got 11 blocks to cut through so we're really just getting started but it's an important footstep taken nonetheless.

Secondly, this Saturday (the 8th) I will be beginning our public outreach to the fandom who don't come by the forums. We're gonna need as many hands sharing and spreading the word as possible. I'll make another post here when the campaign is live on our Twitter. After the tweet is live, we'll need all the retweets and shares we can get. Point your tumblrs to that tweet, link it on your facebook, spread that mess like wildfire. Visibility is important, who knows when it will finally cross the eyes of someone who can help us out in a way others can't?

Hoping for the best so we can get these novels translated as quickly and accurately as possible!

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- Sat Feb 08, 2014 2:43 am#22133
Just a reminder that today is the day we go public and begin our campaign to find some others who are willing to help! Keep an eye here or to the Twitter if you're already following it.

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- Tue Feb 11, 2014 1:01 am#22177
We hit our first milestone today, we are now over 10% complete with book one! Still an absurd amount of work to be done with converting the text and then cleaning it up to proper English. Yet, what we've read so far... everyone's in for a hell of a ride.